Friday, May 17, 2013

Win a Copy of the New Oracle Multimedia Book!

My good friend, Marcelle Kratochvil, is the Oracle ACE
Director for (as she put it to me) "all data/any data." She's been
working with Oracle since V4 and specializes in Oracle Multimedia. She has been
a beta tester for this product since Oracle8i and runs a SIG on multimedia and
unstructured data. Check out her blog at: http://eternal-donut.blogspot.com.au.

Marcelle is a great speaker and able to communicate clearly
how to work with complex data in Oracle. I first met and worked with Marcelle when
she flew up from Australia to speak at my first Oracle PL/SQL Programming
conference in November 2005). And now she's written her first book!

Managing
Multimedia and Unstructured Data in the Oracle Database has just been
released by PackT and covers everything a person will need to know to get them
working in multimedia. And Marcelle should know; as CTO of Piction, she works
with customers all around the world including major museums and universities.
She performs database administration on multi-terabyte Unix and Windows environments
as well as doing serious development work with PL/SQL. She has designed and
built a multimedia search engine, e-commerce system, security system, reporting
engine, shipping system and her own XML parser and language specifically to
handle the workflow needs of managing multimedia.

The book, according to Marcelle, provides an introduction to
multimedia, how to search on it, how to manage it and how integrate it into
your current environment. With lots of PL/SQL examples and schema setup scripts,
Marcelle promises that this book will get you loading and using unstructured
data in no time at all.

Best of all (to me), Marcelle is a strong advocate of PL/SQL
and recommends it for anyone to use for building web based applications and for
working with multimedia. My kind of Oracle technologist. J

To encourage us to check out her book, Marcelle is offering
a chance to win a copy. All you have to do is choose from the most relevant section
below, and send your answer to the question to Marcelle at marcelle@xor.com.au. Marcelle tells me that "The
best, most creative and accurate answer will win a copy of the book." You
must submit your answer by 31 May, 2013.

1. Open Category
(open to everyone): Name three key advantages for storing multimedia in a
database.

2. Museum/Gallery/Print Media (open to
anyone in these industries): What is the biggest issue you face when
digitizing and managing any multimedia in your organization?

3. Oracle (open to any Oracle employee): Name five Oracle products
that are tightly integrated with Securefiles and Oracle Multimedia.

4. Oracle ACE Program (open to any Oracle ACE or ACE Director): Which
Oracle development tool or product is best designed for working with
unstructured data (including multimedia)?